From the Economist:
CLINICAL depression is a serious ailment, but almost everyone gets mildly depressed from time to time. Randolph Nesse, a psychologist and researcher in evolutionary medicine at the University of Michigan, likens the relationship between mild and clinical depression to the one between normal and chronic pain. He sees both pain and low mood as warning mechanisms and thinks that, just as understanding chronic pain means first understanding normal pain, so understanding clinical depression means understanding mild depression.
Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.
This explains a lot. I used to think that I was just basically a failure, but I now am proud to say that I have a highly advanced unattainable goal detection ability, what I’m going to call my “donkey sense”. Examples abound. How well I recall my competitive swimming career, when halfway through just about every race (just about? I lie. It was every race) my donkey sense would kick in; I would realize that the goal of winning, placing or showing was unattainable, and I would settle for the attainable: last place. But my donkey sense has really shown its stuff in my political endeavors. When I was very young I aspired to be president of the United States, but my highly evolved unattainable goal detector would have none of that. By successive applications of mild depressive states I subsequently realized that the presidency, the Senate, the Congress, the Town Council, The Board of Education, and finally, a seat on the Groton Representative Town Meeting, were all unattainable. I am currently fixing my sights on a position on the Water Pollution Control Authority, although as I write these words I am beginning to get mildly depressed.
Now, you may wonder why I call this highly evolved personal trait my “donkey sense”. It is, of course, in honor of the Democratic Party, which has a collective “donkey sense” that makes my feeble talents look like overachievement. Take Health Care as only one example. Why, less than a year ago-can you believe it?-the Democratic Party, including even Max Baucus, was promising us a Universal Health Care system with a strong public option and strong restrictions on insurance company abuses. Well, it took me almost a lifetime to spiral down from the presidency to the Water Pollution Control Authority, but the Democratic Party, with its highly advanced collective ability to detect the unattainable took only 10 months to descend to the attainable. Realizing that it only controlled the United States Senate, the House of Representative and the Presidency, but that it was without influence among brain damaged racists, our elected Democrats, our “brain” so to speak, became mildly depressed and quickly realized that a good health care bill was unattainable. The Republicans meanwhile, who have failed to evolve these advanced unattainable goal detection genes, went right ahead and pursued their goal of killing the bill. The result is that our highly superior party has readjusted its goal to the point where it will now consider it a success to pass a private insurance profit enhancement act, an eminently attainable goal, even without Republican help.
Thank heavens for evolution. Thanks to its beneficent working, the Democrats are able to recognize that achieving true Health Care reform “is a waste of energy and resources”. Just wait until they turn their collective attention, and their collective donkey sense, to the financial industry.
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